Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Office2016 evaluation: new wine in old bottles, but more collaborative

Peter Brett (Peter Bright) is a technology media, "Ars" technology editor. Brett's article covers Microsoft, software programming, software development, web and browser technology and safety and other topics. This article is written by Brett of Office 2016 a review article

Office this year has been 25 years old. In fact, the age of some components to be included in the Office among the larger Microsoft in 1990 but was released the first Office combination packages. The first Office suite includes Word 1.1, Excel 2 and the other three PowerPoint 2 software. According to Microsoft's unique version name, released this year, Office 2016 is actually the first version 16.0

Compared to Office 2013 and earlier versions in terms of, Office 2016 has a very high degree of recognition. Office 2016 will suit all applications within the title bar are accompanied by several applications are inherent in the exclusive colors (Inexplicably, Outlook title bar is still blue, Microsoft does not know for what to consider The abolition of the gold properties in Outlook). This is an optional setting, if you think this feature too bright, you can choose to turn off, turn off this feature in Office 2016 and Office 2013 look very similar.
As a set of desktop productivity applications, Office changes in these years is not large. Microsoft Office 2007 until fishes software interface has been substantial adjustments and the introduction of the ribbon interface (Ribbon Interface). In the Office 2010 suite, Microsoft applications, save, open and office 2016 key print other sectors joined the "backstage view" (Backstage View) function. But the ribbon interface does not change the basic architecture of this application, there is no change in the work of interaction between applications within the suite mode. People can not help but feel this they used to handle text, make spreadsheets, presentations, e-mail and calendar applications written since the era of the ancient Lotus Improv has been no substantial change occurred. At least Lotus Improv also provides us with a formula to follow to today's grid pattern. This time Office 2016 did not break this trend.
Office 2016 in some detail really has changed, for example, function area features a new Windows 7 key application is written, "Please tell me what you want to do?" Text box, the text box is the search engine function area, it It is able to find the function you want to use. The downside is that it does not tell you the normal position of this feature, so you can once again use the search function. If we say that the emergence of similar ill-conceived version of Office 2007, that would still passable. But eight years have passed, and now most commonly used function keys for Office locations are very familiar with. Of course, this does not mean that the emergence of this new feature will not be the user's welcome, it does have to make Office better. It is puzzling why Microsoft needs to spend such a long time to build this feature, obviously the market has appeared to achieve a similar effect to expand the application, some of which even expand the application or Party Publisher

Application also has an "inquiry only" function, it will document the selected vocabulary Bing (Bing) search. Since this function uses the contents of the selected words other than as a reference, so the search results will indeed come out to be more accurate than direct web search. For example, in an article on the carbon-14 isotope (Carbon-14) in the English document the search "dating" the word, the outcome should be a carbon dating (carbon dating) related to the content, rather than the "eHarmony" etc. dating site.
In Office 2016, Microsoft Excel adds a few new chart form, but the chart is still missing state export tool.
In addition, the Outlook add attachments button also added a Office document containing the most recently used menu, this improvement is to facilitate users to add documents as attachments to the message being. The new version of Outlook for sending attachments or links should have better judgment. If you say that the recent record of the use of Office documents in OneDrive, Enterprise Edition OneDrive and SharePoint above words, the document will be sent in the form of a link. The new version of Outlook can document (including links to the form of the document) editable settings, you can easily set a document in Outlook will be read-only mode or edit mode. Microsoft said the new version of Outlook attachment settings menu is unprecedented: it means that the company's employees can send each other a direct link to the attachment and do something to limit the size of attachments. Share documents by mail the way has been a great deal of distress to the system administrator, because relative to the share of the way through the file server, this approach is time consuming and not conducive to the management of space. But considering the convenience issue, share documents by mail has been a way of choice for users.
Obviously, Microsoft did not completely solve the problem using the Office suite, but it certainly is a big step forward for Outlook 2016 improvements.
Used in conjunction with Office 365 (as well as the next version of Exchange) Outlook spam filter has called "Clutter" is. Clutter will lower priority and bulk mail such as public relations unified placed in a separate file named "Clutter" folder. Clutter will mail folder in days to organize and collate buy office 2016 key the results sent to you the day. Clutter will come on their own judgment be modified by the user's operation history. In fact from opinion in recent months trial experience, Clutter's performance is quite good, although the scale of judgment somewhat conservative.
Access and Publisher are also to be included in Office 2016, and that this two applications do not seem to change. Microsoft is just two applications for this change a new look, much criticized for their shortcomings but did not make any substantial improvement.
On experience of software in terms of core functions, and there is not much difference between Office 2016 and Office 2013, Office 2016 only in some of the details were optimized. In the new version of Office 2016, the 32-bit versions and 64-bit versions are equal. But in the past, guidance for Office is: Unless you have a very large data reports need to be addressed, otherwise it is recommended to use the 32-bit version; now becomes: You are free to make a choice among the two, but 64 bit version of Office is more suitable for handling large data reports, and more secure. In Office 2016, you will be more likely to find the function you want to use, but these benefits is not enough to let a qualitative improvement.

Collaborative work is the key
Microsoft Office 2016 will be regarded as a heavyweight product, it's a huge boost of confidence does not come from the core functionality or user interface, collaboration is the key of faith. But it seems a cliché, Microsoft introduced Office 2013, it also had a similar tone playing.
In the Office 2016, Word collaborative authoring capabilities improved. Office 2013 supports multiple users to edit the same document, but users communicate with each other when they are very strenuous. If a user wants to notify other users to conduct their own what had changed, he need to save the changed contents and notify other users refresh the document has been modified so that the content can be displayed. Word 2016 is omitted to save and refresh the trouble immediately change made by the user can be displayed in the document. Although relying on the browser and the market several collaborative editing tools, there is still some room for improvement, but this change is to the user a great convenience. Testing found that Word 2016 users hotsale 2016 key have been locked paragraph editing, so different users can only paragraphs for different collaborative editing, and other such settings and collaborative editing tools Etherpad stark contrast. Now defunct Etherpad support multiple users simultaneously for the same part of the document for collaborative editing.
In Office 2016, the cooperative work of the interface has been greatly improved. The new version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint have a convenient share button. In addition, the Enterprise Edition also integrated Skype account, you can always communicate with co-workers via voice or video.
Although the user interface has been improved, but Microsoft did not carry out any work to enhance the capabilities for PowerPoint and Excel. Microsoft is committed to the next will work together to provide a more sophisticated experience for PowerPoint, and then followed Excel (in fact, now there are some designed specifically for Excel browsers collaboration tools). Microsoft did not mention the above optimization work completion time, but Microsoft promised to honor its commitment to improve before the Office 2019 launch, at least you can guarantee Office 365 registered users do not have ages.

Not surprisingly, this set is the old trick of 2013 of the Office. Office 365 Office authorized to give subscribers can use the Office of the Special edition --Office ProPlus. And general permanent activation of different versions, Microsoft will provide regular feature updates service for Office ProPlus. Version of the 2013 Office ProPlus even includes a number of original open only for administrators or end users new features. In Office ProPlus 2016, Microsoft is to increase the investment for the new features. Office ProPlus 2016 contains elements of the user interface prompts for new features to facilitate the users to understand the software which functions were updated. Windows 10, Microsoft also plans to launch a similar special version, this special edition will set up a major operation "current branch", through this branch, the system can immediately obtain repair or acquire new functions. Enterprise version of "current branch" security fixes can be obtained immediately, but its function update delay for three months but there is.
PowerPoint and Excel synergistic improvement is likely to give priority to the upgrade version of the system for users, especially. Microsoft still attach great importance to a permanent authorized user, it's just to let Office 365 subscribers feel more valuable, priority upgrade Clutter functions and collaborative work are reflected in the value of subscription.
Subscribe value is also reflected in the new group among Outlook. Relying on Office 365 groups feature, Outlook users can create a temporary user group. In order to better facilitate communication, this group can use shared inbox (due to the response will appear at the bottom of each message, so this function looks more like a conversation instead of a log message), shared calendar, OneDrive common storage space and shared OneNote notes. And traditional mass-mailing and Exchange Hitachi sharing different groups can be created at full end-user, it does not require administrator involvement. This is a new feature.
Office 365 includes three new applications, which Delve and Sway there have been several months, is still in a preview state Planner is a new application.
From the "Planner" unimaginative name this shows that it is used as an application program. Users can establish where tasks, task deadline set for the completion of tracking, the task assigned to the different members and view their completion. Microsoft is not satisfied with the application used to create the e-mail only, and it hopes this application can be closer to the Project in Gantt chart (Gantt charts). The basic software seems to be very useful, although it is still in a state of relative isolation. Planner does not and to-do list of Outlook integration, it also did not buy Microsoft's latest Wunderlist application integration. Such integration will enable Planner can work better with existing processes or practice integration.
Delve function is really puzzling. Microsoft is committed to playing a Delve but use Office Graph (Office Graph is the relationship between the company's employees, teams and paperwork involved in between) tool. By algorithm, it can show you what you might be interested in, for example, you can see the team members are to deal with those documents. But not in the document structure as the core enterprise, the application does not seem much use value.